The Ideological Foundations of the Public Services

This study aims to identify the ideological groundwork of public services. It is my opinion that, in an age in which globalisation seems to have undermined the variety of the viewpoints related to how goods and services may be distributed in a given society and in which the global economic crisis has pushed to the background both the option of libertarian neoliberalism and that of the welfare state, neoliberal-interventionist in nature, such a discussion may be productive in order to understand the ideological mechanisms which underlie the configuration of some of the most influential economic theories about the distribution of public services in the contemporary world. Therefore, in the first section of this paper I shall present the main ideological dilemmas relative to public services. In the second part I shall discuss the arguments brought by economic theory in favour or against this issue so that in the third section I shall be able to analyse the arguments specific to political theory.